“There’s a ghost in the washroom!” a colleague of mine whispered as I was filling water from the water filter. “My eyes went round, heart beat accelerated, and hands went cold as I came to know,” she explained with a nervous whisper.

“What! How did you know?” I managed to utter. The idea of ghosts had interested me since childhood. Instead of fairy tales, my favorite bedtime stories theme was horror. The possibility of an invisible being present among the mundane humans fascinates me to the core.

“You know what, it tried to strangulate a house keeping staff this morning and then quietly escaped into the server room,” my colleague quipped as she left the place hurriedly.

I walked through the corridor of the sixth floor to my cubicle, looking beyond the huge glass panels. The weather was gloomy, indicating an impending storm. The people in the corridor were frantic by now, discussing about the ghost. The poor house-keeping staff who had been apparently attacked by the ghost, had taken a half-day leave after getting high fever.

I resumed my work and as the day progressed, the story spread like wildfire throughout the building. People started visiting the sixth floor to detect the probability of the ghost’s presence.

Various versions had come up by then, about the ghost’s identity. Some said it was a girl who had committed suicide in a nearby college, while some predicted that it was a wandering spirit of a carpenter who was trying to seek revenge.

As luck would have it, I had to stay back till 9:30 PM that day.

Being the daredevil I am, as I proceeded towards the corridor to fill my bottle again, I kept repeating under my breath, “If you are here somewhere, please confirm your presence.”

From an unknown corner, I suddenly heard a faint giggle.

I looked around in disbelief only to find that the corridor was empty as most people had left by then. The storm raged outside. The giggle had metamorphosed into a slow hum, almost like the faint sobbing of a teenage girl.

“Was somebody watching me?” I thought nervously as I started walking again. My heart was pounding, there were tiny beads of sweat on my forehead as a silent shiver passed through my spine.

As I crossed the dimly lit server room, I saw something passing beside me. “Was it a shadow?” I was too confused to comprehend anything.
I decided to go to the washroom to wash my face. As I opened the door, it creaked behind me. I heard faint footsteps, and the temperature of that place fell suddenly.

A gush of cold air blew my hair and the grin started again. Shaking with horror, I looked at the mirror, and the lights went off. I felt dizzy as I sensed that someone was breathing right next to me.

My voice choked and I could hardly breathe.

“Here I am, just as you had wished,” I heard a shrill voice whisper in my ears. Another splash of water on my face and all of a sudden, the voice resembled my mother’s voice.

“Don’t you have to go to office?” I heard my mother shout angrily. As I opened my eyes, I hugged her tight and heaved a sigh of relief that the nightmare was over.

It was by far the scariest nightmare of my life. With a splitting headache, as I reached office, I met the same colleague near the aqua-guard. As I greeted her, she whispered in my ears, “There’s a ghost in the washroom you know, we came to know this morning!”

As my heartbeat leaped, from a distance I heard a familiar shrill giggle.